Excellent article for today's email marketing tip. Even if we have been email marketing for awhile we tend to get sloppy at times. Here's a refresher.

"Good looks" are very important in an email message. This is often overlooked by many email users. It is a fact that an emails content is diluted greatly if the message itself is "not good looking".

Have you ever received an email message that looks something like this...

Thank you for requesting
more information about our services! We here
at ABC Company
would like to present a special offer to all of our
cherished customers.

There are two main reasons why email messages turn out looking like this. Although the reasons are quite simple, many email users dont understand them.

Reason number one is called line length. When composing email, most people just type and type without using a hard carriage return. If it looks fine when youre done, your email program probably automatically wraps the words in a nice legible format. This word wrap is usually done based on a line length of anywhere from 70 to 80 characters.

Well, lets say I receive your message, but my email program doesnt have the capability of automatically wrapping incoming messages. Since you performed no hard "end of line" carriage returns when typing your message, my email software thinks its one long sentence. Now your nice, easy to read message looks like that example above.

O.K. So how do you avoid this problem? Simple! When composing email messages, use a hard carriage return before you get to the end of each line. I have found that a maximum line length of 64 works to alleviate this problem almost completely! Of course, youll always run into an instance occasionally, depending on your recipients settings, but this should do the trick 95% of the time!

Another reason people encounter "funny looking" email messages is called proportional character fonts. Like I mentioned earlier, all email programs are different. Therefore the fonts used by each program varies widely. Basically, there are fixed pitch fonts like Courier (found on Eudora) and there are proportional spaced fonts (like AOL and Compuserve email).

With fixed-pitch fonts, all characters in a paragraph will line up directly above each other. With a proportional-spaced font, CAPS, space bars and other keystrokes are wider, so each line is a different length. The bottom line is this. If you create a message using one type of font and send it to an email recipient using the other, the message will not look the same when they receive it!

Once again, the solution is simple! By using a hard carriage return before the end of the line you can keep these problems caused by the difference in email programs to a bare minimum. If you plan on sending the same message to multiple recipients, or attempt any drawings, consider testing the message with a friend on another service.

There is a third way for your email messages to look bad. Although it is far less likely to happen, you should be aware of it. Many word processing or text editor programs allow you to save a file as another format. (Such as ascii.) It may look great to you, but when sent via the internet it can become scrambled.

You may have received one of these messages at one time or another. They are easily recognized by the repeated "U" characters in the text. To avoid this problem, simply use the cut/paste or copy/paste method to extract text from a document in other programs.

The last thing you want is an email message with great content, being dismissed simply because it wasnt "good looking".

This is a great article by Jim Daniels that sheds light on the importance of how your content is displayed to your subscribers. Here a couple of tips that can help you present your content in a professional manner:

• As a rule of thumb, when creating an HTML based message I like to use a table that is no wider than 715 pixels. This will ensure that your newsletter isn't distorted when displayed in certain email clients.
• Also, be sure to accompany the HTML message with a text-based message as well, this is known as a multi-part MIME message. IntelliContact Pro allows you to create both an HTML and text-based message to ensure that your subscribers will receive the alternate text-based version if their email client is not set to view HTML messages.

Highly recommended email marketing software:

Intellicontact Pro

IntelliContact Pro is web based email marketing and list management software that allows businesses of all sizes to add a newsletter sign up form to their web site, send out personalized HTML or text emails, create unlimited lists, schedule messages, send surveys, and view complete reporting metrics for each campaign including open and click through tracking.

You can read about this marvelous software going here

http://www.email-it-secure.com/intellicontact.htm